The gradient rectangle fill is awesome. Well done to work it out! I bet doing it with irregular shapes is a proper head scratcher

Down the line it would be nice some control over the graniness of the gradient dither if your head can take that idea

You were right to go to windows to develop this software.....I'm not sure a BBC or Master would have coped.......Circles are also cool, having an outline is really good.

Down the line some more things I can think of are an airbrush with variable flow , patterns, copy and paste and even layers...I can think of so much!

Having the icons in there is really interesting.....its really looking like a professional program! The multiple undo is very useful of course.....developing this and then painting with it has been a lot of fun so far!

Last edited by pixelblip on Sun Jul 23, 2017 7:22 am, edited 4 times in total.

Elminster wrote:Would be interested to see what a master with pitube co pro and videonula only version could do.

I'm still pretty confident that I could stretch my abilities a little further a produce a similar program for the Master using ASM, but..., I do think that having more screen real estate, extra ram and menu's for tools and the palette do make a nice improvement on what be be possible on a beeb.

pixelblip wrote:The gradient rectangle fill is awesome. Well done to work it out! I bet doing it with irregular shapes is a proper head scratcher

The irregular fill won't be much different to what is already coded, I could whip that up next release for H and V gradients.

I am trying plan more control over start and end patterns and gradient direction, I'll hunt around and play with a few idea's before coding it up... please feel free to offer any suggestions on how it might work

pixelblip wrote:Down the line some more things I can think of are an airbrush with variable flow , patterns, copy and paste and even layers...I can think of so much!

I am still working on the airbrush but I am struggling conceptually on how it will render based on current pattern selected... one idea was that it's just based on the current colour selected and it's a gradual fill using a solid colour... just can't picture how it should flow over the canvas so to speak...

pixelblip wrote:Having the icons in there is really interesting.....its really looking like a professional program! The multiple undo is very useful of course.....developing this and then painting with it has been a lot of fun so far!

I've noticed we're reaching the limit of the free version of BB4W, I've had to cull quite a few commented blocks to ensure enough free RAM is available for stable program operation.

Couple of options here, switch to SDL or buy the full version... I've considered the full version as the graphics performance for this type of application seems to be better suited to BB4W, although as far as I can tell BB4W is no longer being actively developed and the SDL version might be a better long term choice.

We will have to think about this Fourthstone (sdl). Would that be much work for you......you have spent a lot of time on it now. I can live without all the other features but so long as your appetite is still strong we can move ahead with more ideas.....

I can only imagine the pictures are going to get better and better over time. Already in 6 months they have developed.

Small update, time a bit limited but managed to do a few little changes:

* Added place holder icons for brush styles* Updated fill routine to have an unlimited stack, used a sneaky fix so complex shapes don't overflow the stack causing incomplete fills* Changes to tool highlights* General clean up and optimizations

Thank you for posting an update Forthstone.........I've been really struggling this week with the painting.........spent hours on my King Tut - that is the most difficult thing I have drawn yet.......the lips are a nightmare! It's all the reflections in it as well. I must finish it though as I have some unfinished pics still to do that I posted on here a while back. Ho hum!

Hi Fourthstone.I suspect you've been pretty busy with work so this can go on a back burner ....just some small additions which I think could make life easier using ART 2......I hope you don't mind me mentioning this!

One thing is being able to save quickly with an incremental filename. So you just click a button and it saves straight away without any filename popups....that way i don't have to keep going back to an on screen keyboard (which can be fiddly on a tablet ). It would make drawing much quicker and I often save as I go.

Also it would be nice to save as Jpeg but that's minor.................just they don't accept BMPs on here ............

pixelblip wrote:I suspect you've been pretty busy with work so this can go on a back burner ....just some small additions which I think could make life easier using ART 2......I hope you don't mind me mentioning this!

One thing is being able to save quickly with an incremental filename. So you just click a button and it saves straight away without any filename popups....that way i don't have to keep going back to an on screen keyboard (which can be fiddly on a tablet ). It would make drawing much quicker and I often save as I go.

Also it would be nice to save as Jpeg but that's minor.................just they don't accept BMPs on here ............

Busy is not the word my friend, hectic and frantic along with a side of tired and sick work well tho Generally lots going on with home, family, work and busy schedules to keep up with but....

I have been doing some little updates on ART 4 Windows, nothing much worth a release at the moment. I should be able to squeeze in at least the first change you've requested which is the quick save button, this one will be nice and easy (as bmp... ).

The save as jpeg is an option, however I need to investigate whether a lossless compression ratio is possible as standard jpeg will introduce compression artefacts which would effectively blur the pristine mode 2 pixels and colours... will read up about it on the BB4W forums and see if there is a solution.

ctr wrote:png might be a better choice. The last picture, "Toxic Wastedump.jpg", is 215KB. Converted to indexed png it is 10KB, and guaranteed lossless.

I need to find out more details about fixing the png (or jpg) to indexed or lossless, otherwise both are options for saving and loading files.

For now I have added a very basic quick save toggle, please have a play and let me know if it suites your needs?

There is a toggle tool button on bottom right of tool bar (Disk with Q on it), when it's highlighted green that means quick save is active. When active clicking the normal save button will create a new quick save file (BMP sorry) in the program folder... maximum files count is 100000 and file names are saved this e.g "ART_QS_00001.BMP".

pixelblip wrote:I see a zoom icon in there This software defo has the Dpaint old school feel about it.........the more I use it.

The idea of the zoom brush is to stretch the current pattern x2 so that you effectively can get the same pattern but over a bigger area... I think that's what I was thinking Would make it so that if you had the 1 pixel per 16 selected then it would become 1 pixel per 64... still trying to work it out myself

I have also implemented the circle brush which is works for standard drawing and circle outline drawing...

Time permitting I'll chip away at bits and pieces trying to improve as I go.

Feel free to touch up the icons I have created as they're not really the same style as your original ones, let me know if you have the time to have a look?

That's great thanks a lot............I will touch up the icons some more ...........although yours look pretty good!

I know there is always a big wish list but much further down the line...... ........layers would be really cool..........Sometimes I draw the sky in and then draw over the top and think arrgh so go back and re-do the sky...........even if you had say 5 max

I do appreciate we might not have had layers with a BBC micro but we are still in Mode 2 so I don't count that as cheating!

Anyway something to think about incase you find yourself with lots of spare time in your life

Layers would be possible with more memory ala BB4W SDL or something else entirely like visual studio. I need to speed some time writing a conversion for SDL and try it out, if we can get that working that will free up the current issue of constant ram availability pressure and let us work on more advance features which generally require lots of ram for processing.

I really think we've gotten as far as possible with the free version of BB4W barring small feature adds and tuning. Pretty amazing considering BB4W free has a 32kb ram limit for code and variables... not too bad a proggy for being so constrained. The code alone is around 24kb and I've managed to use some really bad coding techniques to limit the ram usage a lot and some down right dirty tricks to emulate more ram like saving undos to disk and using files for temporary ram storage for the fill routine... all in all a really good hack job

One other thing I've been thinking about is adding support for the other graphics modes, and maybe sprite and font editing as well. Would like to make this a general purpose graphics tool for importing, exporting and content creation for some of my own projects... definitely need more ram for that though

Yeh sorry it's easy to forget we are just using 32k for the whole program. I'm really happy to use it as is without extra features.......but if you are still enjoying developing it then we can move it on as it's always been evolving......maybe what is nice is the simplicity of it in one way.....the nice thing about BBC Basic is that it keeps it simple.....

In some ways not having things like layers makes you paint in a way that you wouldn't if you had them.......i.e. if you make a mistake you go back over it.....so there is an argument the images look the way they do ( in a good way ) because of the lack of all of these extra things

Been having a play around with converting ART to SDL. I have the bulk of the program 'functioning' but there are a few issues for which I am struggling to overcome due to differences in the graphics subsystem mainly around graphics performance being a lot slower.

One issue is that drawing is slower and in some cases positively glacial, the fill routine is crippled due to a quirk of using SDL with the POINT command. I have managed to speed it up a little but the fix would required major changes to other parts of the program and I'm not sure once these changes are done whether the performance would be usable so I'm a little hesitant to go further down this path at the moment

So what does this mean? While I like the idea of SDL being compatible across multiple platforms, I'm just not sure the performance is suitable for the type of program we're trying to write.

We can continue to tweak ART for Windows in BB4w and I might focus on tidying up certain areas and trying to optomise RAM usage so we can fit more features in.

My Windows version of ART is still on the back burner for now but I still think that it will be the best option to develop in the long run as memory and features are unlimited (unlike my available time to actually program the thing )

Ahh thanks so much Fourthstone for trying to port it over ( and taking all that time to try ). Appreciated. I think you are right if these problems crop up now you might spend a long time going down a path and it never working. Speed is quite important....

We can always go the paid route for BBC BASIC....I'm happy to pay for it.....It also means we can produce a windows app from BB4W.....that others can run.

Thought it was time I should post an update, been having a little clean up and feature tuning session and wanted to share the current state.

Couple of things to note:* The gradient box tool now is direction aware, e.g. for the horizontal gradient if you drag the box from left to right or right to left the gradient will match the direction of drag, the same effect is applied to the vertical box gradient.* An airbrush effect has been implemented, left me know if the fill is too fast or slow, I'm thinking to add a slider to control the fill speed* The x2 brush style is partly implemented, have a play and let me know what you think... couple of different ways this tool could work but for now it just spreads the current pattern apart by a factor of 2* Lots of tuning so let me know if something is broken

pixelblip wrote:How did you do that airbrush with dithering that keeps its place with tessellated checkerboards of all sizes. Most clever indeed! I was trying to work out in my head how you would do it.

The 2x mode is really great. Another very useful addition for tons more shades. That will open out the look much more.The gradient so useful.

This is the premiere 8 bit style paint package if you ask me! It's a joy to use. I'm going to go mad with the airbrush this weekend and see what happens.

Do download it everyone ......and have a doodle!

Ah shucks, I'm glad you like it! I thought long and hard on the airbrush and in the end I settled on a technique which uses the standard drawing brush with a random number to determine whether or not to draw each pixel.... a bit of a hack job if you ask me but it seems to work fairly well